From Head of Elk to Williamsburg: The Forgotten March to Victory in 1781

This article reconstructs the march of the Franco-American armies from Head of Elk to Williamsburg in September 1781—one of the most ambitious and understudied troop movements of the American Revolution. Drawing on diaries, orderly books, correspondence, and French and American eyewitness accounts, it recovers the march as the operational center of the Yorktown campaign—a fragile experiment in coalition warfare, logistical improvisation, and coordination across cultural, linguistic, and infrastructural divides. Rather than treating Yorktown as the seamless culmination of strategic brilliance, this study reveals the campaign’s success as contingent on the uncertain, everyday labor of movement.